The man who cracked open the creaky wood door at the Greenburg Museum of Modern Warfare looked like he might have seen every war in history. His pale, haggard face had been invaded by wrinkles, many of them marching down his forehead to the thick white eyebrows that he pinched at the sight of the five of us standing outside the redbrick building. The man’s teeth were yellow like his eyes, and his breath smelled like cinnamon—the candy, not the spice. Dad had taught me how to tell the difference.
“I’m sorry,” the old man said, frowning. “We’re closed.”
“I know, but—” Dad started.
“Our hours are posted right there on the door,” the man interrupted. “Feel free to come back tomorrow.”
The door creaked closed again, but my father put up both hands in desperation to stop it. We’d come through mountains and haunted woods. To the tops of bee-infested trees, to the bottom of the bottle and back. Through blood, sweat, tears, and an avalanche of ice-cream vomit, just to find our grandfather. It was hard to imagine anything standing in our way.
“So sorry to bother you, Mr. . . .”
“Oglesby,” the old man said. “I am the curator of this facility, which, as I’ve already said, closes at five p.m.” He pointed at the sign. No doubt he saw us as the kind of people who could not, in fact, pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel.
“I understand,” Dad continued calmly. “But this is important. My name is Fletcher Kwirk. This is my family. I’m afraid we might have left something inside your museum. Something important. And I was wondering if you could just let us have a look.”
The old man’s eyebrows shifted. “Kwirk?” he repeated. The whole family nodded in unison. “Hmph.” I wasn’t sure if it was an I-should-have-known kind of hmph or a that-name-means-nothing-to-me kind. Whichever it was, Mr. Oglesby didn’t open the door any farther, and I suspected my dad—the stand-in-the-back, avoid-conflict-at-all-costs science geek—was about to muscle his way in, knocking this poor old man over like an NFL linebacker, but my mother had a softer approach.
“What war were you in, if you don’t mind my asking, Mr. Oglesby?” Mom pointed to his arm. The sleeves of the old man’s shirt were rolled up, revealing the words Semper Fidelis tattooed in fancy blue script. I had no idea what that meant, but obviously Mom did. “That is the Marines, isn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am. Third Battalion,” the curator said in a manner that made it sound like we should be impressed. “Though I’m afraid I never got the opportunity to serve my country on the battlefield. My service ended abruptly two years before I would have been sent to Vietnam. An accident during a live-fire field test put me out of action.” Mr. Oglesby reached down with his right arm, the one with the tattoo, and tugged at his pant leg, pulling it up to reveal a rather complicated contraption attached to his calf. His black sock concealed most of it, but you could tell by the scar tissue, white and ragged, that Mr. Oglesby’s real leg stopped above the ankle. “At least when I’m told to put my best foot forward, it’s an easy decision.”
I snorted. Judging by the not-so-subtle elbow nudge I got from Cass, maybe this wasn’t meant to be funny, but the smile on Mr. Oglesby’s face suggested a little snort was okay.
“Sorry you lost your foot,” Lyra said.
“This one suits me fine,” the curator replied with a shrug. “And it’s five fewer toenails I have to clip. I’m sorry for your loss,” he said first to Lyra, then eyeing the rest of us. “I knew Frank. And I liked him—even if he did call me Old Splinterfoot.”
I snorted again, but this time I got a cross look from Old Splinterfoot himself, and I snapped to attention, shutting my trap. Probably best not to mess with a marine.
“If you knew my father,” Dad said, “then you should know that he’s actually the reason we’re here. He asked us to come, as a way of honoring him, of paying our respects before we leave town. By letting us in, you wouldn’t just be doing us a favor, you’d be doing him one too.”
The curator stood there, jaw working back and forth as he took each one of us in. When he looked at me, I gave him my we’re-really-not-as-crazy-as-we-look smile.
“Please. Just fifteen minutes,” Dad pleaded. “We won’t cause any trouble.”
I noticed he didn’t say “I promise.” I thought about the mess we’d made in the ice-cream parlor bathroom, the hole we’d left in some poor lady’s backyard, the shards of glass skittering across the table at Bailey’s Pub. Beside me, Cass had her hands clasped together as if she were pleading for her life.
After a suspenseful pause, Mr. Oglesby nodded, stepping back and opening the door the rest of the way. “Fifteen minutes,” he echoed. “After that I’m kicking you out, understood?”
We all nodded obediently.
“And don’t think I can’t kick either. This baby packs a wallop,” he added, tapping his prosthetic foot against the tiled floor. “And I’m not too old to fight.”
As far as museums go, the Museum of Modern Warfare was the first one I’d ever been to that I would want to spend an hour in.
So of course we had only a quarter of that.
The place had high ceilings and a polished green marble floor that I could see my reflection in. The exhibits started in the front vestibule with a display showing the history of America’s involvement in armed conflict, starting with the American Revolution and going clear up to operations still going on in places like Afghanistan. The sign above the main entry into the museum displayed a quote from some guy named H. G. Wells: If we don’t end war, war will end us. Deep, I guess, though you could probably say the same thing about global warming or fast food or the flu.
Mr. Oglesby corralled us in the center of the atrium. I couldn’t help but notice how straight he stood. He had better posture than any of us.
“You’ll have to look around yourselves; I’m not giving you the tour. Don’t touch anything. Don’t sit on anything. And don’t smudge the glass. None of the guns or bombs in here are functional, but the knives and swords are sharp, so don’t mess with them. I’ll be in the front office if you need me.” Mr. Oglesby moved toward the door behind the welcome desk, then turned and put up a crooked finger. “But don’t need me,” he said before shutting himself inside.
Dad got right down to business. “All right. We don’t have much time. I think it’s best if we split up.”
Cass and I shared a nervous look. I figured she was having a total Scooby Doo moment like I was. Terrible things always happen when the gang splits up.
“What are we looking for?” Lyra asked.
“I’m not sure,” Dad said. “Another clue. A hint. Anything with your grandfather’s name or face or even just something that reminds you of him.”
Papa Kwirk was a former soldier who got me crossbows and knives for Christmas, and I was standing in a museum full of deadly weapons. I was pretty sure everything was going to remind me of him.
“Just keep your eyes peeled and call out if you find something.”
Dad clapped his hands and urged us onward, and armed with only the vaguest idea of what we were doing, we crossed under the arch with H. G. Wells’s words of wisdom and were instantly transported back a hundred years, to 1914 and the start of World War I. According to the news articles on the wall, some guy named Franz got shot and triggered what was supposed to be the “war to end all wars.”
“This Franz character must have been a pretty big deal to cause the whole world to go to war over his death,” I remarked. Then again, people do some pretty wacko stuff when somebody close to them dies.
The moment we went back in time, we fanned out to cover more ground. The exhibits seemed to be in chronological order and mostly consisted of cabinets full of tools and uniforms and weapons, plus the placards used to identify them. I scanned everything, skimmed every line, inspected every artifact, looking for clues. The guns grew more high tech the farther you went, firing more bullets faster, though it still only took one to do the job. Bombs got bigger. Uniforms got more pockets. Only the boots didn’t seem to change that much. I paused on a gas mask, thinking about all the times I’d pulled Papa Kwirk’s finger. I doubted this was what he had in mind, but it made me smile thinking about it; he always lifted his leg when he farted to, as he put it, “ensure maximum particle dispersion.”
I passed a hundred-year-old torpedo and a grenade called a potato masher for the way it was shaped. I supposed you could use it for that, provided it didn’t explode in your face and ruin your Thanksgiving, which reminded me of the time our Thanksgiving was ruined because mashed potatoes and lasagna—like dads and grandfathers—didn’t always go well together. Though now, at least, I had some idea why.
After what seemed like ten minutes of fruitless searching through the years 1914 to 1918, I turned a corner and jumped forward in time. I spotted Lyra in the middle of the World War II room, standing near a big display called Troop Transport through the Years. There were pictures of trucks and tanks and planes and boats, all with descriptions of how they’d evolved and been adapted to each new conflict, designed to get soldiers to places most of them were in no hurry to get to.
At the center of the exhibit sat a motorcycle, complete with sidecar. Lyra was admiring it. “It’s a Harley. Papa Kwirk’s is a Harley.”
“They’re called hogs,” I said.
“I prefer to call them Harleys. Hogs sounds uncivilized.”
It was a cool-looking bike. Papa Kwirk would have liked it. I could picture him, wearing a pair of those old-fashioned goggles, riding across the French countryside, delivering urgent stolen documents to High Command. That’s when I noticed Lyra stepping over the velvet rope that was supposed to keep meddlesome kids like us from sitting on the bike and pretending they were fighting the Nazis. “What are you doing?” I hissed.
“C’mon, Rion. It’s a bike just like his. Maybe he left a clue here or something,” she said, starting to explore. She looked in the sidecar and even felt around in the leather satchels that hung from the bike’s rear. “Nothing,” she said after two minutes of looking, plopping down on the edge of the sidecar.
“Maybe that’s because Papa Kwirk didn’t fight in World War II,” I told her. He was a Vietnam vet. We were a few decades behind.
Which probably meant . . .
I heard my father call out from around the corner.
“Guys, hurry up! In here!”
Lyra leaped over the velvet rope and ran ahead of me as we turned down a corridor into another large room. A massive map of Vietnam greeted us, the country divided into a green part and a red part with arrows scattered all around. Mom and Dad both stood in front of a large glass display near the back of the room. The sign beside it said A Soldier’s Story: Vietnam 1967–1975.
I came up beside Dad, whose hands were pressed to the glass. “In there,” he said, almost breathless.
Inside the case was a collection of framed letters, all of them handwritten, some creased or weather-beaten or barely legible. Each letter was accompanied by an artifact: a combat knife, much like the one waiting for me in my attic at home. A rusted lighter. A deck of cards. A dog-eared novel (Stranger in a Strange Land—never heard of it). A Purple Heart medal displayed in its box.
The letters were all written by soldiers, most of them to family members or to high school sweethearts. To My Dearest Lisa. To My Brother Bill. Dear Mom and Dad.
And one to Shelley.
“Go ahead. Read it,” Dad said. I could tell by the catch in his voice that he already had. I pressed my nose to the glass, my cheek close to Lyra’s, who was on her tippy-toes, doing the same.
Dear Shelley,
Thank you for the last letter. And for the picture. The guys are jealous and giving me a hard time, but it’s worth it to see your face. I’m back at base after an S&D and had my first real shower in six days—soap and all. I swear I scrubbed off seven layers before I found my own skin.
Not much to report, thankfully. Got more men down from diarrhea and heat exhaustion than Charlie lately. Bugs and heat. It’s almost like the land itself wants us to leave. Last night Big Mac killed a spider that was big around as my hand. Stabbed it with his Ka-Bar like he was going to roast it on a spit, then started chasing the rest of the squad around the barracks with it. I suspect one of us will find its shriveled-up body in our cot tonight. Big Mac’s crazy like that. Though between the heat and the bugs and the bombs and the boredom, it’s a wonder any of us are still sane.
I am ready to come home.
I can’t stop thinking about that shell, the one I told you about in my last letter. I’ve still got it. Sarge said I could keep it ’cause it was a dud and because it’s evidence that nobody in this war knows how to do a damn thing right. By all accounts, I should be dead. I know it. Sometimes I think maybe you had something to do with that. I figure it was either you or God or both. Everything happens for a reason, right? PFC Griggs says that’s dangerous thinking, says you should assume that every round fired has your name on it and that the next shell that hits will blow your you-know-whats to you-know-where, but what does he know? He’s from Kentucky and thinks Bonanza’s the best show ever made. He hums the theme song as he’s falling asleep.
I miss you, Shel. You’re pretty much the only thing that keeps me going out here. I can’t wait for us to get married as soon as I get back. We’ll find a nice house near the woods with a big backyard where you can plant your flowers and a good tree for climbing. We’ll have a couple of kids and I can teach them how to fish and you can read them your favorite books and we will have Sunday picnics and stuff them full of sweets and spoil them with all the stuff we never had growing up. It will be perfect. I just have to make it through this hell.
I think about you all the time. I think about us growing old together. I would climb a mountain for you, but you know that already.
Wait for me. I’ll be home soon.
Love,
Frank
I read the whole letter twice. As I read it the second time, the whole crazy puzzle of a day slowly started to piece itself together. A good tree for climbing. Learning how to fish. Favorite books. A perfect life. It was all there, in one form or another. Everything Papa Kwirk ever wanted.
Except for the growing old together.
It made my heart ache.
“Did you see this?”
Mom pointed. Next to the letter, lying on its side because it was too tall to stand upright, was an artillary shell.
No, not a shell. The shell. The one Sarge said Papa Kwirk could keep. My grandfather had somehow smuggled it all the way back home. It was his souvenir, his constant reminder of how close he’d come, just how lucky he was. It was olive green with yellow markings and a tarnished silver tip. The word “INERT” had been painted in white block letters across it. I hoped INERT meant “no longer blowupable.” No doubt Lyra would know, but she had something else on her mind.
“Shell,” she said, reciting from her dictionary or maybe just making up a definition on the spot. “A projectile containing an explosive charge. But also, more generally, a hard outer casing designed to protect or hold something.”
I was about to suggest that she should give us some credit for not being total idiots when Dad’s eyes lit up. “Of course,” he said, kissing the top of her head. I wasn’t sure what caused my father’s lightbulb to blink on, but apparently Mom did.
“Oh, Fletcher—you don’t really think?”
“What? What is it?” I asked.
Dad nodded toward the cabinet.
“I think we found him,” he said.
I looked at the glass cabinet, at my father, back at the cabinet. “Wait. You’re telling me that Papa Kwirk is inside that shell?”
Dad nodded. “Something’s in there,” he said. “Has to be.”
There was only one way to find out. Unfortunately, the glass cabinet containing the letter and dud artillery shell was locked. The door didn’t even seem to have a latch or a handle of any kind on the front. There wasn’t anywhere to put a key.
“It must have some kind of release,” Dad said. He got on his tiptoes and reached to the top, running his hand along the edge until it stopped. I heard a click, and then the lock holding the door gave way. A secret trigger. Just like in a Scooby Doo cartoon.
Dad carefully slid the door open and took out the shell with both hands. The tip, where the fuse would have been, was only loosely screwed into the top. Probably somebody had dismantled it to remove its innards, just to be sure it was safe. Dad was still careful with it, though, handing the pointy top first to Mom, who shook her head vehemently, then giving it to me instead.
Dad peered inside the shell.
His breath hitched. He blinked, like, twenty times. Then, with two fingers, he reached inside and pulled out a small plastic bag, much like the one that had held Dad’s childhood book back in the magic tree, the one that I’d almost killed myself trying to get to. Except this bag looked to be filled with sand. Brownish-gray sand.
But I knew what it really was. I knew in my gut.
Dad tucked the artillery shell under his armpit and carefully pried apart the seal, dipping a sweaty finger into the bag, a film of coarse brown dust clinging to the tip of it. He rubbed his thumb and finger together. He grunted and shook his head. And then, for the first time since this whole thing started, my father’s eyes glossed over with tears.
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”
I stood there, staring at the bag of dust in my father’s hands. I didn’t know what to say or even how to feel. Sad? Relieved? Confused? A little grossed out? I think it was all of those. But mostly I felt this weird sense of accomplishment, watching my dad hold his dad, knowing what we’d been through. What he’d been through.
Mom broke the silence, sniffing and wiping away her own tears. “Wait a minute, where’s Cass? She needs to be here.”
I glanced around the otherwise empty room. I wondered if she’d gotten lost. “We’ll find her,” I said. I handed the tip of the artillery shell back to Dad and gave Lyra a nudge toward the Gulf War while I headed back toward Korea. I was rounding the corner to the next room when I thought I heard footsteps.
“Cass, you’ll never believe this. Guess where we found Papa Kw—”
But it wasn’t Cass who appeared in the archway bridging the gap between two wars.
It was Broomstache. The guy from the pub. He was holding a baseball bat. And right behind him was Freckles with a knife.
That was suddenly pointed at my chin.
You know that moment when you’ve just discovered your bananapants grandpa’s ashes hiding inside a fifty-year-old artillery shell in the middle of a war museum in his hometown, and you turn the corner to find yourself face-to-face with a couple of armed thugs who have, apparently, been stalking you for most of the weekend?
That’s the moment when you should act on instinct, letting your fight-or-who-are-we-kidding-it’s-really-just-flight reflexes kick in, making you turn and run back to your parents rather than just stand there, staring dumbly at a man with more freckles on his cheeks than a planetarium has stars, giving him the one second he needs to get two beefy arms around you in a chest-crushing hug.
I could feel the point of the knife just tickling beneath my chin as Freckles pushed me around the corner back into the room where we’d found Papa Kwirk.
Mom gasped and Dad started forward the moment they saw me, but he froze when Broomstache snarled.
“If you know what’s good for your family, you won’t take another step, Mr. Kwirk. And you won’t try anything stupid. We don’t want to hurt you or your kid. But we’re not opposed to the idea. So just stay right where you are and give us what we want.”
Broomstache bumped his aluminum baseball bat against his leg. Thump thump thump. He had a cockeyed kind of smile. Smug and sinister all at once. Freckles held me tight, so close I could smell the stale cigarette smoke in his clothes. His arms were extremely hairy. Yeti hairy. And muscular. I felt like my ribs were about to break. The more I struggled, the harder he squeezed.
Dad’s hands went up again, the same as they had with Mr. Oglesby, except what had worked with the old curator wasn’t going to work this time. “Please,” he pleaded, still holding Papa Kwirk’s artillery shell in one of those hands and the bag of ashes in the other. “We’ll give you whatever you want. Is it money? I’ll give you everything I’ve got. Just let my boy go.”
Dad’s face drained of color. I’d never seen him this scared before. Of course, I’d never been this scared before either. My eyes darted across the room, looking for some sign of either of my sisters. My hope was that they knew what was happening, that they were already going to get help, circling back to the front of the museum to warn Mr. Oglesby and call the police.
“We don’t want your money,” Freckles barked in my ear, his voice huskier than his companion’s. “We want the formula.”
If I hadn’t been held at knifepoint, I probably would have given Freckles a puzzled look. Formula? Formula for what?
Then it dawned on me. No. Freaking Way. It couldn’t be.
Dad shook his head. “Formula? You mean for the jelly beans?”
With the hand not holding the bat, Broomstache reached in his back pocket and pulled out a small notebook, the kind Lyra would copy unfamiliar words in to look up later. He tossed it across the tiled floor, where it skidded next to my father’s feet. “Write it down,” he growled. “All of it.”
In that moment, a flash of anger masked the fear that I’d seen on my father’s face. “You’re from Garvadill, aren’t you? They hired you to come and find me?”
“We don’t need you to talk, Mr. Kwirk,” Freckles insisted. “Just give us the formula so nobody gets hurt.”
Yes, I thought. Just give them the formula so I don’t get hurt. The man had a knife pressed to my Adam’s apple. We were in no position to negotiate.
“Give them what they want, Fletcher,” Mom urged. Her voice sounded desperate, but her eyes were steely, staring at the two men less than thirty feet away. She glanced sideways once, and then fixed those blue eyes back on me. It will be all right, her look seemed to say. We won’t let them hurt you.
“Okay. Yes. Absolutely. Whatever you want,” Dad said quickly. I tried not to swallow and struggled for a breath as Dad knelt and set Papa Kwirk’s shell on the ground, placing the bag next to it and taking up the notebook instead. He removed a pencil from his back pocket—the same one we’d used to unscramble the fourth clue—and flipped the notebook open to the first blank page. “The formula is complicated. There are steps that I should explain. It will take time to write it out, and even if I do, I don’t think you would understand it. If you just let my family go, we can talk this through. Let them leave, and then we can go somewhere, just the three of us, and I can give you the formulas for everything we’ve got.”
“Or you can just shut up and write,” Freckles snapped. “Before we lose our patience.” The point of the knife pressed a little deeper.
“All right!” Dad said. He started to scrawl something in a hurried hand. In my head, I begged him to write faster. To just jot down some random chemical equations. Surely these two goons wouldn’t know the difference between the formula for fried-chicken jelly beans and the formula for baby aspirin. Next to Dad, my mother started to ever so slowly dip her hand into her purse.
Beside me, Broomstache pounded the head of his bat into his open palm. “Come on, Mr. Kwirk. We ain’t got all day,” he warned.
“Ain’t is not a proper contraction” came a salty voice from the corner of the room.
Freckles twisted me around in his giant monkey arms to confront the voice, only to find my pigtailed little sister with her hands on her hips.
“But I guess you wouldn’t know that, you bumbling, backwater, boorish buffoon!”
“What did you call me?” Freckles spat. In that moment, I really thought he was going to let go of me and go for her instead. Except he didn’t realize that Lyra was only providing a distraction.
So that he wouldn’t see the other girl sneaking up on us from behind.
It would have worked, too, if it wasn’t for his partner. But Broomstache’s “What the—” gave Freckles just enough warning to spin me back around to find Cass standing less than ten feet away.
Armed with a sword.
It wasn’t the kind she practiced with all the time, with the pencil-thin blade and the rounded, cuplike guard. This one looked more like something a military officer would carry, with a long, curved blade and a more ornate handle. But Cass still held it confidently in one hand, its tip pointed in our direction.
“Unhand my brother, you vile fiend,” she said between clenched teeth, no doubt channeling her inner Elsalore. For once, I didn’t mind.
Freckles dragged me backward, pressing his back to one of the glass cases that lined the wall as Broomstache took up his bat in both hands and stepped toward my sister. “Put that down, little girl, before you hurt yourself,” he said.
Cass gave the sword her customary flourishing twirl. I knew what was coming. I’d been through this before. My sister narrowed her eyes.
“En garde,” she said.
What happened next was pure Kwirk.
Cass’s first lunge was parried easily off Broomstache’s bat, but it was followed so quickly by a second that he barely had time to recover, just knocking the sword out of the way, but losing his balance in the process. Stumbling back, he couldn’t manage to deflect Cass’s third stroke—a hard blow across his right arm. The old saber must not have been as sharp as Mr. Oglesby promised, judging by the thin scratch it left, but it was still enough to send Broomstache’s baseball bat clattering to the ground.
Freckles, meanwhile, momentarily shocked by the appearance of my blade-twirling sister, suddenly cried out in pain as Lyra rushed out of her corner and sank her teeth into his forearm, causing the knife to slip from his hands. I felt the iron grip on my chest loosen as he tried to shake off my vicious little sister, giving me just enough room to maneuver and drive my elbow as hard as I could into his gut. I slipped free just as a voice called out.
“Rion! Duck!”
I crouched and spun to see my mother with her purse in one hand and a canister of pepper spray in the other. She kept just about anything you could ever need in that bag.
Freckles took a full shot of fiery spray to the face, temporarily blinding him. The bumbling, backwater, boorish buffoon screamed and pressed his fists into his eyes, turning and running face-first into a glass display of army helmets, smashing his nose bloody and sending him crumpling to the floor.
I looked just in time to see Broomstache stagger as another of Cass’s expert slashes found his cheek, slicing a bubbly red cut that ran clear down to his chin. He cursed and fumbled toward her, stretching out his arms, no doubt ready to tackle her or choke her to death, when Dad grabbed him by his shoulder and spun him around.
The last thing Broomstache saw was the bottom of Papa Kwirk’s shell clonking him right between the eyes, sending him crumpling beside his partner.
Dad stood over the brute’s body, the inert shell in his hands, ready to deliver another shot if necessary. But even though it had been a dud during the war, the artillery shell was still good for something. Broomstache and Freckles were both out cold.
The sound of more footfalls echoed from around the corner, and all five of us looked up to see Mr. Oglesby in the entryway, wide-eyed and gasping.
“What in General George S. Patton’s name is going on here?” he shouted.
We stood there, my older sister wielding a sword borrowed from an exhibit, my father holding the artillery shell, and my mother looking all too trigger-happy with her pepper spray. Two men lay unconscious on the floor, one with tooth marks on his arms and two swollen puffy eyes, the other with a red welt on his forehead and a couple of bloody scratches to boot. It probably defied explanation, but Dad tried anyway, like always.
“They broke in,” he said. “They were trying to steal something. But we stopped them.”
The curator shot my father a skeptical look, then quickly scanned the room to see what else was broken or missing. The glass case with the letters from Vietnam was the only one open, but only the one shell had been removed. There was a knife and a baseball bat on the ground, neither of them part of the museum’s collection.
“You say they were trying to steal something?”
All five of us nodded. Mom tucked her pepper spray discreetly back into her purse. Lyra smiled real big. Cass set her borrowed sword gently on the floor.
Mr. Oglesby reached out with his wooden foot and gave Broomstache a little nudge, just to make certain he was unconscious. He looked back up at Dad.
“Oorah, then,” he said.
And he left to call the police.